Social Question

I have some questions about facebook and iphones/blackberry's, can you help?

I don’t have an iphone or blackberry, but I want to know what sorts of updates they can get from facebook.

Can they receive everything? All status updates from everyone of your friends who updates a status, or only what someone posts directly to your wall or inbox?

Also, if I post something, and someone with a blackberry has it set to receive facebook updates and posts to threads, but then I change my mind and delete the post, can they still see it in their phone? Does it not erase on the phone, even though you have deleted it on facebook, and no one can see it on facebook anymore?

There are no push notifications (ie, like text alerts – when the phone tells you something happened, without you going to ask for it) for random status updates. There are, however, for when someone sends you a message, posts on your wall, or comments on something you commented on or posted.

If you post something on my wall, that’s sent to my phone. If you later delete it, it doesn’t matter, the notification has already been sent to my phone.

There’s a free app for Facebook for my BlackBerry. The notifications come in a form of an email to w/e account you have your email capabilities linked too. It might take a while to reach you though and you have to go into your inbox and delete them (which is annoying). I have a BlackBerry Curve though, not one of the newer ones.

Just to be clear on my intention of asking, I regret a status I wrote, and later some of the things I wrote on the thread. I deleted it, but I worry that one of my friends will probably tell a particular person what I wrote if she saw it. I deleted it quickly, so it is unlikely she saw it on facebook, but if it was sent to her phone, I am SOL right? And, she can actually forward it to the person I prefer not see it, right?

@judochop false. They’re available on my iPhone. I get them all the time.

@JLeslie There are no push notifications for status updates. Unless you posted it on something she’s following (a post of hers, a photo she commented on, etc), she didn’t receive a notification about it. That doesn’t mean she didn’t see it though. Despite you saying you deleted it quickly, she still might have seen it if she happened to be browsing at the exact moment you posted it.

There are also third party applications that let you “follow” when a person posts a status update. For example, the Twitter application Tweetdeck lets you add a person from Facebook. This has nothing to do with phone applications. Your status update might have been picked up by these other applications before you deleted it too.

@MrItty I am not sure what “push” notification means, forgive me for my total ignorance on this. So, if I wrote a status, and she is getting my status updates, she would see it, but she would only see a another post by me on the thread if she was following, is that right? I am only concerned about the post I wrote on the thread, not the original status, but I did write both. Then a within a minute I removed the entire status and thread.

You asked specifically about phone notifications. It will not be sent to her phone automatically. That’s what “push” notifications are – notifications sent from facebook to the phone automatically. Those don’t happen just because you update your status. Nor do they happen for the comments on the status unless she has commented on it or “like“d it.

HOWEVER, her phone is not the only way she could have been notified about it. She could have been browsing Facebook on the web at the time you made it. She could be using another application that constantly scans status updates and notifies their users about it.